11–20 of 159 posts
Incidentally, this describes what I believe to be the great difficulty of PhD research. You have to take a topic you find interesting and read all possible related work in it, which tends to result in significant scope creep as you realize just how much there is that already does you want to do. Having exhausted your initial energy and excitement for the project, you have to force yourself the remaining 20-30% of he…
Oh man I feel that in my bones. Any advice on how to mitigate this?
Incidentally, this describes what I believe to be the great difficulty of PhD research. You have to take a topic you find interesting and read all possible related work in it, which tends to result in significant scope creep as you realize just how much there is that already does you want to do. Having exhausted your initial energy and excitement for the project, you have to force yourself the remaining 20-30% of he…
Day 400: Having thoroughly described a universal theory of everything, we set out to build an experimental apparatus in orbit at a Lagrange point capable of detecting a universal particle which acts a mediator for all observable forces in the known universe.
You start with a simple goal → then research → then keep expanding scope → and never ship.
The people who actually finish things do the opposite: lock scope early, ignore “better ideas”, ship v1.
Most projects don’t fail due to lack of ideas, they fail because they never converge.
Incidentally, this describes what I believe to be the great difficulty of PhD research. You have to take a topic you find interesting and read all possible related work in it, which tends to result in significant scope creep as you realize just how much there is that already does you want to do. Having exhausted your initial energy and excitement for the project, you have to force yourself the remaining 20-30% of he…
Oh man I feel that in my bones. Any advice on how to mitigate this?
Incidentally, this describes what I believe to be the great difficulty of PhD research. You have to take a topic you find interesting and read all possible related work in it, which tends to result in significant scope creep as you realize just how much there is that already does you want to do. Having exhausted your initial energy and excitement for the project, you have to force yourself the remaining 20-30% of he…
Day 1: We aim to demonstrate the effectiveness of an existing industrial catalyst in a novel application that has not seen commercial usage, potentially lowering cost of production of precursors for essential medications Day 400: Having thoroughly described a universal theory of everything, we set out to build an experimental apparatus in orbit at a Lagrange point capable of detecting a universal particle which acts…
Interesting read but the author's thoughts were all over the place.
This resonates hard. LLMs enable true perfectionism, the ability to completely fulfil your vision for a project. This lets you add many features without burning out due to fatigue or boredom. However (as the author points out), most projects' original goal does not require these complementary features.